[quote name='glhf' timestamp='1325616494' post='4899348']
Guess we'll just have to agree to disagree.

In other words, you are going to hold onto your opinion regardless of how thoroughly it is demonstrated to be false.

Your defense is that players won't be able to play 100% perfectly every 0.1 second during a fight/match.[/quote]Sigh.
You said we should assume that players can play perfectly. It's blindingly obvious that such is never going to be the case due to computational complexity and cognitive limits.

Also, I'm not talking about starcraft now since I never played it but if a game is too fast paced for human reflexes etc to play then it's flawed and need to be slowed down.[/quote]Not too fast to play. Too fast to play perfectly. And it's not Starcraft specifically, but every single videogame that isn't a pure puzzle or strategy game. Humans do not play videogames perfectly.

Personally, my reflexes are good enough to counter abilties that have only a 0.3 second animation.
If a game only has 0.1 second animations then it sounds like it's way too fast paced (unless someone can prove it's possible to react to 0.1 second animations).[/quote]It seems you don't understand what "perfect" means. A perfect Starcraft opening would require the player to make several accurate clicks and keypresses per millisecond during the first frame of the game.

We're designing the game to be played by players, not by bots.[/quote]That's sort of what I have been trying to tell you when I say any "unfairness" which human players cannot find is not relevant.

P.S: There's chess masters that can beat the best bots in chess.[/quote]Dunno what that has to do with anything. But according to you, chess is "unfair" since it has classes Black and White. We cannot solve Chess. After a few thousand years of play, we cannot even know whether Black or White is supposed to be the overpowered class. It's pretty obvious that your definition of "unfair" is completely meaningless.
[/quote]

If you want to last say in this pointless discussion then you can have it.
You still haven't proved me wrong.

I'm telling you that when you think about the max potential the "class" has then you have to think about how close to the max potential a player can go.. Because that is the "effective" max potential. Those hairlines and micro milliseconds and micropscopical things you're talking about that only a Ultra advanced alien bot can do is nonsense that shouldn't even be taken into consideration.

You still haven't proved me wrong.

OK, once more with simple sentences.

You said that a class-based game is always imbalanced. Starcraft is class-based and is balanced. Therefore, you are wrong.
(Feel free to replace SC with Virtua Fighter, Guilty Gear or another highly balanced competitive game.)

In games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim, the save/load feature never really made me feel less immersed. In fact, if I felt I had to go through with my decision to lop someone's head off and face the entire city full of guards and citizens afterwards, I would rarely do it and wouldn't end up having much fun...

Maybe it's just because these games are the type where, if you die, you load your last save and try again instead of having the storyline changed. However, I still feel like I'd like to win if I can, whether it's on the first try or the seventh. I'd prefer trying multiple times.

I don't think this would ruin immersion, because in my opinion, immersion isn't "thinking you're inside the game" - you'll almost always be aware that you're playing a game, but if you're immersed, you'll care more about what happens in the game. If your players care enough to repeatedly try to beat the specific fight, then why stop them?

I say, let them save/load, but tell them and remind them throughout the game that they don't have to win to progress.

Not to derail this post back on-topic, but...this! All of this! It's fun to have the option to try out a few strategies before settling on just one, and sometimes it's fun to just go total rampage on a village, without having the consequences of such permanently tied to your character. Save/load gives players greater options to play the game the way they want to play it; it causes less anxiety about making sure you're always doing the "right" thing, regardless of what you actually feel like doing.

But really, for me it still all boils down to the simple fact that I need to be able to quit and turn off the game when I'm done playing. If a game's going to hold me hostage, making me play for another half-hour before I can save and quit, then I'm not going to be playing that game all that much. Period.

(blah)

(blah)

Please keep it civil guys. Balance is a complex issue, and extremely difficult to evaluate for all but the simplest rulesets. Strong statements such as 'Starcraft is balanced' or 'Classes are always imbalanced' are actually pretty difficult to support, and frankly, off topic for this thread. If you want to discuss balance, please do so in a new thread.

[quote name='GHMP' timestamp='1325627085' post='4899397']
In games like Fallout 3 and Skyrim, the save/load feature never really made me feel less immersed. In fact, if I felt I had to go through with my decision to lop someone's head off and face the entire city full of guards and citizens afterwards, I would rarely do it and wouldn't end up having much fun...

Maybe it's just because these games are the type where, if you die, you load your last save and try again instead of having the storyline changed. However, I still feel like I'd like to win if I can, whether it's on the first try or the seventh. I'd prefer trying multiple times.

I don't think this would ruin immersion, because in my opinion, immersion isn't "thinking you're inside the game" - you'll almost always be aware that you're playing a game, but if you're immersed, you'll care more about what happens in the game. If your players care enough to repeatedly try to beat the specific fight, then why stop them?

I say, let them save/load, but tell them and remind them throughout the game that they don't have to win to progress.

Not to derail this post back on-topic, but...this! All of this! It's fun to have the option to try out a few strategies before settling on just one, and sometimes it's fun to just go total rampage on a village, without having the consequences of such permanently tied to your character. Save/load gives players greater options to play the game the way they want to play it; it causes less anxiety about making sure you're always doing the "right" thing, regardless of what you actually feel like doing.

But really, for me it still all boils down to the simple fact that I need to be able to quit and turn off the game when I'm done playing. If a game's going to hold me hostage, making me play for another half-hour before I can save and quit, then I'm not going to be playing that game all that much. Period.
[/quote]
I agree. It's annoying when you feel like you "have" to play longer because you'll lose progress if you stop now. Quick-save features like Fallout 3 and Skyrim had were life-savers in situations like these, and both of those games were ones I was immersed with.

[quote name='Stroppy Katamari' timestamp='1325723143' post='4899778']
(blah)

(blah)

Please keep it civil guys. Balance is a complex issue, and extremely difficult to evaluate for all but the simplest rulesets. Strong statements such as 'Starcraft is balanced' or 'Classes are always imbalanced' are actually pretty difficult to support, and frankly, off topic for this thread. If you want to discuss balance, please do so in a new thread.
[/quote]
You made my night with those quotes...they were so fitting of the situation.

[font=verdana,geneva,sans-serif]I remember playing Half-Life back in 1998 and constantly abusing the Quick Save hotkey. That was such an immersion breaker, yet I had a lot of fun with that FPS due to its awesome scripted events, scary encounters and, of course, its original story. Ten years later, in 2008, I play Fallout 3 because, to be honest, I was a huge fan of the Fallout series. Didn't think F3 would make it and yet, I was pleasantly surprise.

What a great game! The experience was very immersive for me: I was stopping to watch the water, I care for every NPC who was killed by rebels, I remember I was very angry about those people in Andale. I didn't felt the need to save in F3. Every time you enter a building or travel on the map, the game AUTO-SAVES my progress, which worked great for me.[/font]

What if you want to make a game, any game whatsoever, where combat is involved, and you really want for player to lose some battles. Not that the battles are scripted for player to lose, any given battle is winnable, but rather that winning or losing a battle will direct the story in different directions...

[font=verdana,geneva,sans-serif]All games should be made that way in my opinion. A rigid game is a dead game in a short time. I remember in Fallout 3 a Brotherhood commander asking for my help to rescue his apprentice from a building guarded by mutants. I accepted but failed to protect the commander and he died. I entered the building looking for that boy and I found him dead. What's interesting is that, a couple of months later when I played again the game, I managed to keep the commander safe and I rescued the apprentice from the mutants. To my surprise, the boy was now alive. To recap: accept quest to save apprentice from commander. If commander dies, you found the boy dead. If the commander survives, you can rescue the boy. You succeed or you don't, the world goes on. ;)[/font]

To recap: accept quest to save apprentice from commander. If commander dies, you found the boy dead. If the commander survives, you can rescue the boy. You succeed or you don't, the world goes on. ;)

This is only one side of the coin. The fact that the game makes a certain decision transparent to you, that is , you believe that your decision was without an alternative, avoids a load/save session, but on the other side, you want to give the player a challenge.

Think about a simple game: the rule is, you need to throw a basketball in the basket 10 times in a row. When you fail, you need to start again.

This is hard for an unexperiented player, but with time and practise he will master this challenge. Now think about a save/load mechanism, this would allow the player to count every hit and even an unexperiented player will archieve the goal after 40,60 or maybe 100 tries. An experienced player will need only 15-20 tries first time. After this, just ask the player and most likely the experienced player will say, that it was too easy, not really a challenge at all, boring...

The funny thing about this is, that we often tell our children that every hit counts, when we see that they are not able to master the challenge yet and don't have the ambition to archive it. In the game designer world we react in a similar way. We see that the casual player is not able to master the challenge, nor has he the ambition to do so, that is the reason we reduce the challenge or take it away completly [s]to get their cash[/s]... to get them on board.

The 'truth' is , when you want to deliver a challenge, you need to get rid of the save/load mechanism. When the game gets too hard, you need to change the challenge instead (easy = 5 hits, normal=10 hits, hard=20 hits in a row). Thought a 'stop now and continue later' option is always useful to give the player the choice to when and how much to play your game.

I believe that this is one of the reasons that multiplayer games like MW3,BF3,L4D,TF2 gets so popular, because they deliver a much higher challenge than current single player games.

This is hard for an unexperiented player, but with time and practise he will master this challenge. Now think about a save/load mechanism, this would allow the player to count every hit and even an unexperiented player will archieve the goal after 40,60 or maybe 100 tries. An experienced player will need only 15-20 tries first time. After this, just ask the player and most likely the experienced player will say, that it was too easy, not really a challenge at all, boring...

Here's a question, though: if the player thinks that playing that way--saving after every throw--is boring, then why would they play that way? Save/load doesn't require you to save all the time, it just gives you the option. It's like how in some fighting games, you can get through them by just mashing buttons, but if you're doing that, and you're not having fun, it's totally your fault, not the game designer's. Or like in Scribblenauts--people complained about how you could keep using the same few items to solve every puzzle, but it's not like the game's making you do that; you're choosing to play the game in a way that makes it uninteresting to you.

I, for one, love it when games let me put in a password. I may not have seen this since Rainbow Six on N64, but if you can save/load, and alternatively put in a password (as in most NES games that are 25 years old now) that, too, is pretty cool, at least. I have a very fond memory of playing Aladdin (SNES) all the way to the end and losing to Jafar. Years later, I found the game again, and somehow managed to remember the password (I probably still could if I saw the menu), and I was able to beat it. It was bliss.

Yes, I understand all the reasons why it could be impractical, impossible, or undesirable. I also don't care.